I
have inflicted many thousands of pounds of
legal costs on them, and I shall keep my
powder dry.

April
27, 2007 (Friday)Madrid
-- Lleida (Spain

TODAY I shall drive over to Barcelona, but the
publisher I want to see is at a book fair in
Bologna. It may even be true. I shall speak to a
small private audience tomorrow, and then drive on
Sunday down to Cádiz, on the other corner of
Spain, the bottom left-hand corner by Gibraltar
which is, oddly enough, not shown on my (Spanish)
map.

The rain has stopped and the sun is smiling too.
I am driving for the first time in two years -- I
forget where I was in the meantime. The new edition
of the Dresden
book was delivered from the printer yesterday
in England: most go to America, some to Warsaw, and
the rest to Rugby.

Of course I cannot take this necessary final
step, as I am now out of the U.K; I shall keep my
powder dry.

April
28, 2007 (Saturday)Lleida
-- Barcelona (Spain

THIS
is a big country.

At two pm I arrive at Barcelona, at the
Librería Europea. About fifty have packed
into a room to hear me speak. There is standing
room only, although Pedro has been unable to
advertise the meeting, at my request. It is an
interesting evening.

Pedro Varela reminds them that the last
time we met was on his birthday, October 3, 1989. I
was staging a protest demonstration in Berlin
outside the broadcasting center of Sender Freies
Berlin in Masuren-Allee. SFB had just un-invited me
from an historians' discussion panel, as all the
other German historians had refused to sit at the
same table as me.

Our placards that night read,
"DEUTSCHE HISTORIKER - LÜGNER
UND FEIGLINGE " - German historians are
cowards and liars. (The public prosecutor in
Nuremberg, as I later found out, actually issued
criminal proceedings against me for race hatred
because of the word German).

At a press conference that morning in Berlin's
Hotel Kempinski, recalls Varela, I had told him and
the world's press that in my opinion Germany would
be reunited in twelve months' time. There were
hoots of laughter from the disbelieving
journalists: but on October 3, 1990, exactly twelve
months later, German Reunification took place. As
The Daily Telegraph reported that day, I had
remarked that German journalists had the horizon of
a lavatory lid. (I cannot claim the credit for that
remark: it was used by Adolf Hitler against
his generals: See The
Memoirs of Field-Marshal Keitel, which I
translated).

Varela and I share one other distinction. The
Austrians imprisoned him too, for six months during
a lecture tour of Austria, before releasing him
without charge or apology. I served fourteen
months, 400 days in solitary confinement in a
Viennese jail under the same laws.

THE price of indepedendence. I tell this Spanish
audience now that clearly something did
happen in the camps in Poland, algo ha
pasado; the railroad line going
up into the forest at Treblinka just ends
there, so something clearly happened to the people
in the trains that went up there and did not
return; I agree that the figures may be open to
doubt; but what concerns me directly as an
historian and biographer of both is the individual
roles of Adolf Hitler and Heinrich
Himmler in all this.

I tell them that the Höfle
document, if genuine, is a crucial, vital,
key piece of evidence. The Schlegelberger
document, which conformist historians of course
have to ignore, is the other piece of evidence that
impresses. The audience becomes restless.

One or two audience members are disgruntled at
this seemingly non-revisionist position, and one
actually walks out. Question time is lively; there
is the usual dunderhead who makes an endless speech
instead of asking a question. Melisa
Scheuermann (right) buttonholes me afterwards;
we gossip in Spanish for half an hour -- her accent
betrays her immediately as Argentinian. She is the
author of children's books, and her own gifted
illustrations, strongly reminiscent of the work of
Arthur Rackham, could have come from one of
my mother's own books like The
Dawnchild.

Afterwards Manfred, a German, drives ahead of me
northwards out of Barcelona to pilot me to the
apartment that has been offered to me for the
night. I have been told only that it is "on the
coast". After driving a hundred kilometers and
forking out cash at four toll-booths I hail Manfred
over; he reveals it is "only another fifteen or so
kilometers." I am not pleased by this, since it is
in totally the wrong direction from Cádiz.
At eleven p.m. I give up, turn around, and set out
back for Cádiz at once, after a needless 230
km detour!!!

April
29, 2007 (Sunday)Barcelona
-- Andalusia (Spain

I DRIVE all night. Just like old times. At
eleven a.m. I am already at Alicante -- still on
the autopista -- and here I persuade a hotel
to let me go online. I email to Paul in
Cádiz: "I am in Alicante, heading south.
Drove all night from Barcelona. I shall probably be
in Cádiz tomorrow afternoon, and would stay
two nights perhaps; I shall enjoy a talk."

A long onward drive down to Andalusia. Arrive
around seven-thirty pm and check into a hotel a
stone's throw from where we used to stay in the
1970s. At least here in the south, unlike
Catalonia, there are no highway tolls.

April
30, 2007 (Monday)Andalusia
(Spain

I AM surrounded by Very Common people, the
English abroad. Liverpool, Birmingham, and
Manchester accents abound. All the people I was so
pleased to leave behind in England, they're all
here.

I go for a stroll and try to get my bearings;
the old hotel we all stayed in, in about 1973, is
some way back towards the hills, its view of the
Mediterranean now totally obscured by these modern
concrete monsters, heaps of square blocks; and
humans like ants, pink ants, are scurrying
everywhere.